Child Abuse in the Catholic Church: Against Weak Men

An atomic bomb has gone off this week in Pennsylvania, with the grand jury report finding, on page 1, that most of the 1,000 abuse victims they identified were boys — victims, therefore, of gay priests.

And yet the Roman Catholic World Meeting of Families will feature a priest advocating for changing Catholic teaching on homosexuality, and feature speakers who have endorsed this view or who are themselves badly compromised on the issue. It’s insane. It’s a bad joke. …

I’m reminded of a Jordan Peterson quote sent to me this morning by a pissed-off parish priest, who had the bishops in mind: “And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

But enough about the bishops. What kind of men are the laity? Reader Matt in VA put up an explosive comment, which he begins by quoting C.S. Lewis’s famous remark about “men without chests”:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

What does anybody do to make anybody involved here stand up/man up/take responsibility/clean house? There is this sense that seems to permeate Christianity of the more conservative/orthodox variety that goodness and honour and “enterprise” just happen. Put all your trust in the Lord, right? …

But will any Catholics even go so far as to put together a picket line outside these bishops’ residences? I wonder. Maybe some lonely victim of abuse will stand outside holding a sign, but there won’t be anything organized, I bet. …

A few of the commenters on these threads are noting that they believe that in the past, enraged fathers and community members would be going after these priests and knocking their teeth down their throats. But us comfortably middle-class 21st century Americans would never do something like that. After all, Christianity is about forgiveness, and never doing evil to do good. Funny how these arguments work to justify doing nothing about anything other than more committees and more “standards” and more b***s***. Funny how these arguments are really arguments for behavior that is indistinguishable from that of cowards.